Please note, this isn’t a criticism of the people of Italy or the country itself. In my youth I had the occasion to the Italy, I found it to be a beautiful country, with beautiful and diverse people.

Leftists just can’t help themselves. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking climate, economics, or politics, they simply repeat lies as if it somehow makes them true by repeating them. The NY Times, of course, has perfected this tact.

Eduardo Porter didn’t just repeat a lie, he repeated several, he used it to slip into delusional absurdity wishing to take everyone else on his fantastic trip to an alternate universe.

He writes in a recent column,

Italy may be in a funk, with a shrinking economy and a high unemployment rate, but the United States can learn a lot from it, and not just about the benefits of public health care. Italians live longer. Their poverty rate is much lower than ours. If they lose their jobs or suffer some other misfortune, they can turn to a more generous social safety net.

Every developed country aspires to provide a better life for its people. The United States, among the richest of all, fails in important ways. It has the highest poverty and the highest infant mortality among developed nations. …..

No wonder we can’t afford to keep more children alive. In 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available, the United States government spent about 16 percent of its output on social programs — things like public health, food and housing for the poor. In Italy, that figure was 25 percent.

I’ll get to the lies in a minute. Porter is advocating we become more like Italy! He advocates higher taxes not just for the wealthier, but also for the middleclass as well! He describes Italy as being in a funk. A funk?!?!?! They’re on the brink of total economic collapse and only continue by being propped up with Eurozone money! They’re in the mess they are in because of their taxing and enhanced social programs. Why do leftists ignore the reality of economics? This guy is supposedly an experienced economic journalist!

Supporters of individual liberty and national sovereignty have been skeptical of the United Nations, and with good reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the U.N. pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global currency.

But there’s another international bureaucracy, also funded by American tax dollars, that is even more pernicious. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has the same leftist ideology as the U.N., but it actually has some ability to change policy.

Now, these two lies have been thoroughly debunked. The OECD’s calculation of infant mortality misses several factors in their calculation, but mostly they blow by not making allowances for the different ways different countries report infant mortality.

WHO says a live birth is when a baby shows any sign of life, even if, say, a low birth weight baby takes one single breath, or has one heartbeat.

The U.S. uses this definition. But other countries do not — so they don’t count premature or severely ill babies as live births-or deaths.

The United States actually counts all births if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity, or size, or duration of life, notes Bernardine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health and former president and chief executive of the American Red Cross.

And that includes stillbirths, which many other countries do not count, much less report.

Also, what counts as a birth varies from country to country. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) before these countries count these infants as live births, Healy notes.

In other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless, and are not counted, Healy says.

And some countries don’t reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth, Healy notes.

Norway, which has one of the lowest infant mortality rates, shows no better infant survival than the United States when you factor in Norway’s underweight infants who are not now counted, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The U.S. ranks much better on a measure that the World Health Organization says is more accurate, the perinatal mortality rate, defined as death between 22 weeks’ gestation and seven days after birth. According to the WHO 2006 report on Neonatal and Perinatal Mortality, the U.S. comes in at 16th — and even higher if you knock out several tiny countries with tiny birthrates and populations, such as Martinique and San Marino.

It is a complete fabrication to state “highest infant mortality among developed nations.”

The other lie is the U.S. has the “highest poverty” among developed nations. They’re not measuring poverty when they do that insipidly stupid calculation, they’re measuring wealth distribution relative to the individual nations. For a clearer explanation, we can go back to noted economist Dr. Mitchell……

You may be wondering whether the bureaucrats at the OECD who put together these numbers are smoking crack or high on crystal meth. Well, they certainly can afford lots of drugs since they get tax-free salaries (just like their counterparts at other international bureaucracies), but these numbers are the not the result of some ketamine-fueled binge.

Instead, the OECD is lying. The website refers to “poverty rate” and “poverty threshold” and “poverty measure,” but the OECD is not measuring poverty. Instead, they have concocted a new – and deliberately misleading – set of data that instead measures the distribution of income.

And if you’re wondering where they got this crazy idea, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this is a scheme developed by the Obama Administration and it is designed so that “poverty” is only reduced if incomes become more equal, not if poor people become better off.

…the new definition has strange consequences. Suppose that all Americans doubled their incomes tomorrow, and suppose that their spending on food, clothing, housing and utilities also doubled. That would seem to signify less poverty — but not by the new poverty measure. It wouldn’t decline, because the poverty threshold would go up as spending went up. Many Americans would find this weird: People get richer but “poverty” stays stuck.

I had hoped that this country would have an honest dialogue about our economics. It’s almost impossible when you have these leftist rags and journalists deliberately propagating lies.

23 Responses to N.Y. Times Repeats Lies And Slips Into More Absurdity—- Wants Us To Be More Like Italy!!!

suyts, those are lies for you; because you have to try to understand the Red’s philosophy: western Reds want ”everybody to be equal” but because they can’t bring the third world’s living standard to the western -> they are into lowering the western standards to third world; so we are all equal. That’s cool, from their prospective

My philosophy is: if rich people have bread = there is lots of breadcrumbs for the poor. If the rich join the poor – the poor are the biggest losers, but good for the reds. It’s easier to start anarchy, when is empty belly and the bills not paid. The Reds love poor people, that’s why they are creating more and more of them.

If there are more givers than receivers = the receivers are much better off. American poor is much better than, middle-class person in Zimbabwe. Reds prosper in anarchy. Can you dig it tovarish?

The OECD also hates the German school system. So in the rankings of their PISA studies (which have nothing to do with the city of the same name) Germany always is last. We have, according to the OECD, the worst schools of all OECD countries yet we design the cars for all of these countries.

And just like the NYT, our media dutifully reports everything from the OECD or the UN as the pure gospel because, for unknown reasons, our journalists love unelected supranational bureaucrats and hate democratic national states.

The reason the OECD hates our school system is BTW that after the first 4 (or in some German states 6) grades we give pupils the choice between 3 different school forms with varying difficulty level, broadly speaking.

The OECD wants total equality so any system that recognizes inequality must be destroyed. That is their purpose.

I think a better word than “equality” is “equalness”. “Equality” has a lot of positive connotations that don’t belong with this situation. I thought about that for years when my graduate advisor worked to “spread out” my hard work to others in the research group because it supposedly “looks better” to have a group of six people have one success each rather than 5 duds and 1 person with six successes.

It’s certainly not “fair” and I never thought the word “equality” fit it either. So I settled with “equalness” or “evenness”. My advisor seems to have changed his philosophy on this to at least some degree, but for me it’s too little too late.

For these people, they’re looking to make everything exactly even for everyone…just see the president’s thoughts on Title IX. The only time it’s not okay to be even is when the minority has/gets the advantage, then it’s okay.

Income inequality is a serious issue. This is what created things like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. It also can create social problems in general. The amount of tax does not seem to be the main issue to me but the tax system creating distortions is an issue. Things like the healthcare mandates will also spread incomes as a high paid employee costs the employer a lot less than a low paid worker as a proportion of income to cover for health insurance which of course comes out of wages in the end (no it won’t directly affect the price of a pizza as it is a supply and demand story). So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and consider the implications of income disparity and why might there be high income disparity in the US?

Suyts
So on this theory you support Obama because the disparity had an imediate uptick when he arrived , so financial crisis and rich get richer doesn’t seem quite right. The 1% are the only ones laughing under Obama. Look at the 3rd graph down the page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States I question your assertion that the level of socialism is all that different and also I can’t see the cause and effect as Australia in broad terms is on par with the US in gov spending. The direction the socialism goes may be very different and this could be the cause, but in my opinion not the level of socialism. Assuming the following definition is about right. “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Look at industries like the car industry which is in common for both our countries we take money off others (often low paid workers) to pay high wages of car workers.

Looking further down the Wiki page there is an historical graph on tax rates and if you cut out the 1% which will not have any major effect on the median the 20-60% lowest incomes had there taxes decrease from 1960 to now and those on higher incomes had their taxes go up. So at the same time the tax system has already become more progressive the income disparities have increased. It seems to be the inverse of what you are suggesting.

Kelly, I would offer that you’re considering these things in an improper context.

In a closed statist society wealth accumulation at the top would be a concern, but “poverty” in the U.S. is a relative term. The standard of living for the poor in the U.S. has increased dramatically in the last thirty years or so.

When viewing Income inequality, there is an implicit connotation that the rich are taking something which would otherwise be held by the middle and lower classes. This isn’t true in our western societies.

If I have enough to feed, house, and cloth me and mine, what is it to me that my neighbor owns a yacht?

While I do agree there are some changes needed which would lower the diversity in income inequality as a by-product of the changes, income inequality in and of itself is no reason to pursue the changes.

What we’re seeing is a by-product of our retirement plans. Economists seem to think Australia has a much better system, though I haven’t looked at it. Essentially, the U.S. has two forms of retirement plans. Social Security for the poor, and stock investment for the workers with jobs that do such. (govt employees is a different story) The stock plan (401k and the like) started in about the late 80s. Millions of American workers on a daily basis blindly throw money at the stock market through their retirement plan. This is why the rich are getting richer and the rest are not. The wealthy have routinely taken profits from the market after it reaches a certain level. But, the markets are, in part, buoyed by the American workers so the markets can never truly bottom out. This is a problem we need to fix. The game was set to where the middle class and the poor could never close the gap between the wealthy and the rest.

But, the fix isn’t necessitated by income inequality, income inequality is a product of this stupidity.

The Soviet Union was not created by income equality. Rather, it was created by shipping in Lenin from Switzerland, Trotzky and 250 of Trotzky’s thugs from NYC via Canada to St.Petersburg, where they toppled the social-democrat government. After that, Lenin and Trotzky had to fight a bloody cibil war for the next 5 years to bring Russia under control.